May — a month when even the most inattentive lover of settling into the library with an interesting book is capable of noticing the remarkable, long-established changes outside the castle walls. Spring had come in hard, grudgingly, and though the weather had settled into something unambiguously fit for a walk, it was only now, in the early days of May, that you could breathe in the full breadth of scents from a nature blooming at full force — could see genuinely vivid colours in the greenery all around, bright even under cloud cover.
Not that any of this made things much easier for anyone. The Aurors kept working, the professors kept trying, and the students were up to their ears in desperate attempts to catch up on missed material — and most of them had a truly formidable list of things missed. The fifth and seventh years felt this most acutely of all, since the approximate topics, questions, and tasks for the OWL and NEWT examinations were known to everyone, and even I had found a degree of difficulty in them — despite having covered five years of material thoroughly and from every angle.
Quidditch training continued at its usual pace — not frequent, but thorough. Tamsyn, as captain, gave no one any quarter. Then again, no one was slacking off either; people approached training seriously, if not obsessively. According to the others, I was doing excellently in the Beater role, and the Slytherins could look forward to some brutal pressure in the upcoming match.
But all of that — school life, personal training and team sessions, theoretical and practical magical study, prefect duties — was routine. It ran along without incident, and as such it barely registered in my attention. Unlike the artefact work.
On Thursday, the second of May, with an hour to go before dinner, I sat in the library and finally set down the last mark in the design for a pair of protective artefacts. All that remained was to produce a few experimental prototypes for testing. With that thought, I closed the notebook, pushed it to the edge of the table, and cast an absent gaze over the reading room, which was packed with students in robes frantically trying to fill gaps in their knowledge. Judging by their faces, there was no one here reading or studying purely out of curiosity. Everyone looked tense, dishevelled, anxious.
Finding no one of interest, I packed my things into my bag and went in search of the twins. Something needed to be discussed. Drifting through the stone corridors of the castle, reaching out mentally to the little spiders and filtering through their data for the twins' probable location, I kept passing individual students or groups hurrying towards the library, or debating some point of magic. Too much talk of studying, too much — only the younger ones, first and second years, were still tearing around or lurking in corners, cheerfully wasting time and enjoying the magical life as it ought to be enjoyed.
The twins were found in one of the galleries on the fifth floor. They were enthusiastically telling their housemates and fellow teammates — Alicia and Angelina — something or other. The boys had been chasing after those two for quite a long time, come to think of it, with uncertain results — things would be going fine, then they'd have a row, and these swings were simply constant. It was none of my business, of course, but this was one of the downsides of a near-perfect memory — you couldn't forget something even if you tried.
Having climbed to the fifth floor via the staircases in the Main Tower, I reached the relevant gallery almost immediately — the boys were standing by one of the enormous stained-glass windows.
"Hello, everyone," I gave them a wave.
"Oh, Hector!" The twins greeted me with grins. "Business call?"
"You could say that."
"Ladies," George made an exaggerated bow in the girls' direction, "we find ourselves obliged to take our leave, as it were."
"Literally two minutes, I imagine," Fred added, making no such theatrical gestures.
We stepped aside a couple of paces.
"Right, boys. Time to grab the bull by the horns, as they say."
"That we can do," Fred nodded.
"Always up for it," George confirmed. "Any kind of action. What bull? What horns?"
"I've finished the calculations on a pair of protective artefacts. First things first — we need to settle on the form, so to speak. That's why I came to you. Anything works for me, but you might suggest something practical."
"Right, understood. But that's not all, is it?" Fred grinned.
"Not all, no. You've probably noticed from the papers, and just in general, that the Dark Lord is preparing some sort of full-scale operation. Things are far too quiet — no one's showing their face, nothing's happening..."
"Almost nothing," Fred glanced at George.
The twins conducted their silent exchange of looks and clearly reached some definite conclusion, then turned back to me.
"A great many magical creatures — fairly dark ones, in all likelihood — have probably gone over to him," George said, glancing around. "We've heard... verified rumours..."
"Does that happen?"
"I'd even say," Fred smirked, "that stranger things have happened."
"In short — rumours that creatures and other dark beings are converging of their own accord on the outskirts of London."
"Of their own accord?" I was genuinely surprised. "Wouldn't it be simpler to move them somehow?"
"Well, you could always ask You-Know-Who yourself," Fred said drily. "But broadly, yes, we're inclined to think something's coming. Before the end of the school year, quite literally."
"That's the second reason I was looking for you. Even though your shop isn't open yet, right now — at this very moment — you need to open negotiations with the MLE and the Auror Office about purchasing protective artefacts."
"Only, how do you picture that working?" Both twins managed to ask the question simultaneously.
"Don't forget which house I'm in. I'll find the right contacts. What I need from you is a politely worded letter on behalf of yourselves and your company, along the lines of: we can supply protective artefacts, here's our offer. I can draft it myself if needed, though it'd be better coming from you — it's your business, after all."
The twins thought it over, scratched their heads, and even looked a touch embarrassed — almost imperceptibly.
"Feels a bit one-sided, that," Fred said, with some hesitation.
"In what way?"
"Not much is being asked of us, and yet we get a cut. You could organise all of this yourself and not throw Galleons away for nothing."
"I could. But you can't earn all the money there is, and this way you'll be in good standing with the Ministry — and I won't be too exposed, given that the route to market through the 'big players' didn't pan out."
"Did you try?" George asked immediately.
"Of course. They don't take me seriously. And the ones who do are far too brazen and greedy, and generally insufferable."
"Sounds familiar," the twins exchanged knowing grins.
"For me this is a hobby — a profitable hobby, a contingency plan in case the main one falls through. So a mutually beneficial arrangement with you suits me much better. Who knows how things shake out down the line. I help you today, tomorrow I might need help myself."
"That actually makes sense," Fred agreed. "All right. We'll put together a draft letter—"
"—and you can fix it up if needed. You're clearly good at putting nice words together—"
"—and your handwriting's brilliant."
"Excellent. In the meantime I'll make the prototype artefacts, and after dinner we'll go and test them. On the subject of the artefacts — one, as you wanted, will produce a solid Protego Totalum sphere. The second — a compound Protego in the form of a slightly convex shield, elongated upward."
"Like a legionary's scutum?" Fred seized on the idea immediately, and George nodded rapidly, looking at me with an eager question in his eyes.
"Something like that. That's the one I was thinking of as a left-hand artefact—"
"Yes, yes," the twins were already fired up. "You could activate it instantly—"
"—and your wand hand stays free—"
"—and you'd work magic much faster, since you don't have to spend time on defence."
"Right. So — what form should it take?"
The twins didn't even pause to think before launching into ideas. After about a minute's discussion, we landed on the conclusion that the optimal form for such a thing was something integrated into a glove, or a structure encircling the palm, or a ring on the index finger. Activation would occur by pressing a specific area — the twins considered this the most sensible option, since the left hand, or the right depending on the individual, frequently goes entirely unused in a duel. For the Protego Totalum artefact — a wide bracelet for the right hand with a generous surface area for touch activation. You couldn't cast spells from inside a Protego Totalum, but you could prepare your magic and keep your target in your sights, while with your free hand you'd be ready to drop the dome at any moment, rather than wasting a full wand motion on it. The idea of combining them into one artefact — or even onto one hand — the boys rejected outright for a simple and obvious reason: an unfamiliar system in a fight was a recipe for confusion if everything was concentrated on a single hand.
I'd always known those two had brains. Even if they deployed them in a direction that many people — myself included — found less than ideal.
Having agreed to meet right outside the Great Hall after dinner, we went our separate ways — the boys back to the girls who were waiting for them, and I to one of the empty classrooms near the common room. The room ought to be free now, and if it wasn't, making a couple of artefacts in my corner of the dormitory was no great inconvenience.
Reaching the door in question, I opened it and looked inside — younger students were enthusiastically practising basic magic, and sparkling bursts of spellwork kept flying from one corner of the room to the other. The boys and girls hadn't even noticed my arrival, and I had no intention of disturbing them. I closed the door quietly behind me — dormitory it was, then.
The common room was almost empty — at this hour, most people were still wandering the castle, attending to their own affairs or even still in lessons, and so only a handful of fourth-years sat at one of the tables, arguing animatedly about something while simultaneously performing some magical indignity upon an unfortunate potted plant. Almost certainly some assignment from the Head of House — she liked setting that sort of thing for students with a talent in Herbology, while still not taking on any personal pupils. At least, in my memory she hadn't taken anyone on for private tuition, though Neville spent a great deal of time in the greenhouses helping Madam Sprout with her plants. That, incidentally, was a question that genuinely puzzled me — why not take on such a gifted student, one who practically breathed and lived for plants? I couldn't fathom it.
Going to my corner behind the folding screen, I pulled out my portable anvil on wheels. Though "anvil" was the name in name only — not because of any resemblance in shape, but on account of its function. Could you really call a thick sheet of iron on wheels an anvil? You couldn't, not really. But that was beside the point.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the anvil, hammer laid out beside me, I first picked up the notebook and my wand. Having thoroughly reviewed the enchanting scheme, I visualised mentally how and in what order the runes and symbols needed to be applied to the hammer head, where each line should run — all strictly in accordance with the arithmantic calculations. Only after that did I take the wand in hand and transfigure a new hammer head — all the magical patterns, engravings and other elements had already been folded into the transfiguration image, so it couldn't quite be said that I was transfiguring something imbued with magic.
Finishing the transfiguration, I picked up the head, turned it over, examining it carefully. The magical matrices slowly began filling with energy, simply from the ambient background of Hogwarts and from my own natural output. The local school of magic paid absolutely no attention to energy efficiency, owing to the simple absence of any need for it — which was a shame. On the other hand, the probability of spontaneous triggering in artefacts and similar objects built on the local magical tradition was essentially zero — they simply wouldn't have enough energy, and not every material is capable of accumulating it in sufficient quantities on its own... But there I go, drifting off again.
Setting the head down next to the hammer, I picked up my wand again and turned to transfiguration — the artefact blank needed to be made. The twins and I had already agreed on what it would be — nothing unique. We'd decided against reinventing the wheel and settled on a simple, plain ring, wide enough to be touched easily by the thumb, with the option of simplified mental activation for anyone sufficiently developed in that regard. Any magical object could, in principle, be activated mentally, but it typically required a specific — and sometimes excessive — effort of intent, simply because of the need to deliberately channel magical energy; and as I had gathered, not every witch or wizard developed that particular aspect of their talent, given the straightforward existence of wands and other such tools.
The ring itself, once forged, I would coat in an additional layer of metal via transfiguration — simply to conceal the lines and patterns characteristic of my artefact-making technique. It wouldn't, of course, protect the piece from a sufficiently curious and determined mind; anyone who set out to examine those patterns could do so. Only there was no point whatsoever in doing so, since they were laid not by human intent but by magical energy itself, and depended on a multitude of factors down to the number of atoms of a given substance in the material and their mutual arrangement in crystalline lattices and so on. Obviously, no two patterns would be identical even on ostensibly identical artefacts — which meant that identifying regularities, extracting meaning, performing a kind of magical reverse-engineering was simply not feasible. And the local diagnostic methods, primarily oriented towards identifying the nature of an enchantment, would reveal only a complex algorithm governing the energy-efficient process of producing three varieties of Protego.
Nodding to my own thoughts and conclusions, I produced a dozen rings — steel, polished to a mirror finish. Placing one of them on the anvil, I picked up the hammer, attached the head, and through my wand channelled into it the magical blueprint for three forms of Protego — standard, reflective, and doubled. This combination would protect against every class of attack short of those that bypass such defences entirely — the Killing Curse being the obvious example. Though I'd always thought that putting up a shield against Avada Kedavra and expecting a positive outcome required a particular species of alternative intelligence, at its terminal stage.
The moment the magic entered the hammer, I gave the thing a light swing and struck the ring. Sparks and a ringing sound — but the sound insulation in my corner was perfect, and I would disturb no one. Except myself, inevitably — no matter how many times I'd performed this procedure, it was like the first time every time. At least there was no urge to shake my head afterwards.
The mirror-finished ring sat in the middle of the anvil, a finest cobweb of magical pattern traced across its surface. Picking up the artefact, I could barely sense its magic at all — and even that was more a product of distortions in my background energy than anything radiating from the ring itself. My work was extraordinarily energy-efficient and didn't broadcast.
Standing up, I activated the ring, and before me — for literally a second — appeared a shield, elongated upward, generously wide, slightly opaque and faintly glowing. It lasted that one second, two at most, then vanished — even my work's energy efficiency couldn't compensate for the inherent nature of these spells, which don't hold long and need to be cast at the very instant before a spell hits you. An artefact like this would genuinely shift the balance of a fight — a wizard no longer needed to concentrate on defence, freeing up that time for offensive spellwork instead.
Taking my wand and transfiguring a thin layer of strong, smooth, mirror-polished steel around the ring, I put the artefact in my pocket and set about making another ten or so — a matter of minutes.
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